All 16 '80s Stephen King Novels, Ranked

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Jeremy has more than 2200 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings).
When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account.
He has achieved his 2025 goal of reading all 13,467 novels written by Stephen King, and plans to spend the next year or two getting through the author's 82,756 short stories and 105,433 novellas.

If you're sick of hearing about Stephen King, too bad. He’s been everywhere lately, but he’s also been everywhere always (everything, all at once, all that), having had his first books published back in the 1970s, more than half a century ago now. He’s remained prolific throughout the 2020s, and as far as movie adaptations of his stories go, there were four that received wide release in 2025 alone, plus some TV adaptations, too.

But to go back in time a bit, the 1980s was an especially productive decade for Stephen King, as he had 16 books published during this time, including some under his Richard Bachman pseudonym, and one co-written with Peter Straub. What follows is a ranking of those novels, but none of his novellas or short stories originally compiled in collections (so no The Mist, nor the novellas that were later adapted into The Shawshank Redemption and Stand by Me).

16 'The Tommyknockers' (1987)

The Tommyknockers - book cover - 1987 (1)

At the risk of spoiling things, this ranking will end with a massive and messy Stephen King book that’s massive and messy in a good way. And here, it’s also kicking off with a long and scattershot book by King, but it’s those qualities in a bad way. It’s The Tommyknockers, which is about people in Maine being driven mad by some strange, buried object in the woods.

It ends up progressing into science fiction territory, and it’s a genre King’s not as consistently good at excelling within as he might be with supernatural horror, but he’s put out some good sci-fi books before… The Tommyknockers just ain't one of them, though. This one goes on for way too long, and proves pretty tedious to read, even if there are brief passages here and there that prove intriguing and sometimes surprising. It’s not entirely without merit, but you just have to sift through quite a lot of bad to get to the stuff that’s not so bad.

15 'Thinner' (1984)

Thinner - 1984 - Stephen King - Richard Bachman

With Thinner, you get a story idea that probably would’ve been better explored in a novella, since this King book (the last under his Richard Bachman pseudonym before the secret was revealed) does drag quite a bit, even though it’s only about 300 pages long. The main character is a lawyer who escapes a manslaughter charge, but then has a relative of the victim put a curse on him.

Said curse is where the novel’s title comes from, as Thinner involves this lawyer rapidly losing weight, eventually to a dangerous extent, all the while trying to reverse the curse before it’s too late. It’s a bit messy, even though it’s not sprawling, and it feels like some work to ultimately finish, which makes Thinner a lesser Stephen King book overall, sadly.

14 'Roadwork' (1981)

Another Bachman book, Roadwork feels like a slightly more polished version of what Stephen King was going for when he penned the more controversial Rage, also as Bachman. Rage is about a student lashing out at school, with a firearm (hence the controversy), while Roadwork is about another troubled individual being pushed to breaking point and reacting violently, here being a man dealing with a string of misfortunes.

Roadwork is a bit slight, and it doesn’t quite achieve its full potential, but it isn't too bad overall.

It's the kind of thing that was done a little better in film form, with Falling Down having a sort of similar story without being an actual adaptation. Anyway, Roadwork is a bit slight, and it doesn’t quite achieve its full potential, but it isn't too bad overall, and it’s not one of the worst Bachman books, since it’s a little better than Thinner, and quite a lot better than 1996’s The Regulators.

13 'Christine' (1983)

At the risk of ruffling some feathers, here’s a generally well-liked Stephen King book ranked fairly low: Christine. Granted, it is still a decent read, and if you like all the other/better King books from the 1970s and 1980s, then Christine is worth diving into for sure… it’s just that it feels a bit unwieldy and unfocused, and not in ways that necessarily feel intentional.

Describing the premise of Christine probably makes it sound exciting, though, since it’s about a seemingly possessed car that ends up forever impacting a pair of teenage boys who once considered themselves friends. It has a fun, very King-esque idea, and there are some typical ingredients in place to, you'd think, make Christine another winner among King’s early works, but it never quite coalesces or finds the right sort of groove. It disappoints, in the end, even if some of it’s still fairly readable, and even entertaining, in parts.

12 'The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger' (1982)

The Dark Tower_ The Gunslinger - 1982 - Stephen King - book cover

With The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger, Stephen King began a very ambitious series that ended up being seven novels long (plus one interquel, and various other stories that crossed over), called The Dark Tower. Technically, this first book of the bunch was partially published in the late 1970s, with a handful of stories being compiled for this overall novel, and then it was further refined into one coherent whole 20 years later, with an extra 30-ish pages of content added, plus some other stuff slightly altered.

It usually feels fairest to judge that revised version, except for here, since that revised version technically didn’t come out until the early 2000s. So, the 1982 version of The Gunslinger might be more interesting if you're a hardcore King fan, but it’s less in line with the series it ultimately started, and a bit more choppy in its 1982 form, so that’s the main reason it is, with some sadness, ranked a little low here.

11 'The Running Man' (1982)

Receiving a somewhat faithful but still flawed adaptation in 2025, that year for a new The Running Man movie was appropriate, given the original book was set in the distant future of… uh… 2025. It’s a dystopian novel about a high-stakes televised game show, and it makes for a good companion piece with The Long Walk, which was another dystopian Richard Bachman book that got a movie adaptation in 2025.

The Running Man isn't quite as good, but it is ultimately the best of the Bachman books that isn't The Long Walk. It moves at a pretty good pace throughout, and some of it has aged regrettably well, should you choose to read it, for the first time, in a post-2025 world. It’s one of the better early sci-fi-focused books King penned, overall.

10 'Firestarter' (1980)

Firestarter - book cover - 1980 - Stephen King

It feels weird to rank Firestarter low, since this is the point where things start getting really good, but the ranking is actually still in its bottom half, at this point. Even worse, The Gunslinger and The Running Man were already really good Stephen King books, even with their flaws, so Firestarter is really gooder, but it still only just cracks the top 10, out of 16, which might not sound all that amazing.

But there really isn't too much to criticize here. This is a very compelling read that sees King in his wheelhouse, sort of expanding on some of the stuff he’d already done in Carrie, but with a few more moving pieces and a much longer duration overall. Firestarter is quite moving, consistently exciting, and also a surprisingly easy read, and again, it doesn’t feel great to rank it in what seems to be a low and underwhelming position, but things do honestly just get very good from this point on, so it is what it is and all.

9 'The Dark Half' (1989)

The Dark Half - Stephen King - book cover - 1989

One of quite a few Stephen King stories set in the fictional town of Castle Rock, The Dark Half is a story inspired by the outing of the Richard Bachman pseudonym. Here, the narrative involves an author putting to rest his own pseudonym in a symbolic way, but then that pseudonym rises from the dead and starts to torment him, also tracking down and killing various people in his life.

That sounds ridiculous, and very high-concept, and The Dark Half is, but King generally makes it work. It goes pretty wild without getting too sprawling in nature, with a digestible 400-ish pages (depending on the formatting of the version you find) being just the right length for The Dark Half to be weird, and go off on some tangents, but not too many, and not too drastically sized tangents, either. It doesn’t end as well as it begins, but it also doesn’t end terribly. By and large, it’s a pretty strong and engaging read.

8 'Cycle of the Werewolf' (1983)

Cycle of the Werewolf - book cover - 1984 - Stephen King

Cycle of the Werewolf is a lesser-known Stephen King novel, and also one that is, by some definitions, more of a novella than a novel. But it was released on its own, rather than in a compilation like Four Past Midnight or Different Seasons, so it’s being counted here as a novel, even if it’s a pretty quick read overall, and can be gotten through in less time than it would take to complete, say, The Langoliers or The Body.

With Cycle of the Werewolf, it's a structurally interesting book that dives into some typical werewolf-related horror, with each chapter focused on a different month, and each month having its own werewolf attack with every full moon. If anything, it could stand to be a little longer, but for what it is, Cycle of the Werewolf is pretty damn great, and also pretty damn underrated.

7 'Cujo' (1981)

Jumping from werewolves to, uh, another canine-related threat, but of a more mundane variety, here’s Cujo. The mundane nature of the horror in Cujo is a feature, though, rather than a bug, since this is very grounded for an early horror novel by Stephen King. The titular Cujo is a dog turned violent because he’s been infected with rabies, and nothing too outlandish takes place during the rampage that ultimately ensues.

Like, maybe Cujo is kind of heightened, and this writer has no idea whether it’s a realistic look at rabies necessarily, but it’s not like the dog is some mythical or extra-terrestrial creature, nor is it rampaging around Castle Rock (yet again) because it’s been taken over by a supernatural being. It’s just bad luck that what happened to Cujo happened, and then further bad luck for the people impacted by the ultimate events of the novel. It’s both a devastating and oddly addictive read, overall, with 300-ish non-stop pages of action, suspense, and horror absolutely flying by.

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